![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Narratives from locals were used to attempt to reconstruct what precisely happened with the Yahi: their eventual reduction to only a handful, their willingness to raid for food to survive, Ishi and the last few survivors the 1908 ransack of their last village and the death of all but Ishi. The author then returns to the past, speaking of what was known regarding Indigenous life in California before contact with the Europeans, the Yana tribe and its divisions, how relatively untouched the Yana were by the Spaniards and the Mexicans, but then how the Americans continually attacked and slaughtered them with prejudice. The author begins with that moment: his arrival near Oroville, his expectation to be killed, being protected in the jail, the summons for the anthropologists from UCalifornia-Berkeley. The author was married to one of the men who worked intensively with Ishi when he descended from the mountains, alone and starving, in 1911. The tragic yet revelatory story of Ishi, the last of the Yahi, the last documented Indigenous person to live in the wild in the United States. ![]()
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